“Love Lies Bleeding” has muscles rippling, veins bulging, and electronic music pulsating. It's a very sexy neo-noir, covered in sweat, blood, and bug guts.
The final scene may seem a little underwhelming, but that moment, courtesy of Ed Harris munching on a beetle, is by no means the only outlandish provocation in Rose Glass' film. Large or small, it will be destroyed under the starry desert.
Not everything works. A heavy dose of melodrama and flashy surrealism take away some of Love Lies Bleeding's macabre fetish. But this feels tantalizingly close to an idealized version of Kristen Stewart's film. Stewart has been one of the most exciting stars for years. But Love Lies Bleeding, in which she plays Lou, a cynical gym employee who falls in love with bodybuilding drifter Jackie (Katie O'Brian), is a vivid film in which Stewart puts all her obsessive talents on display. Gives you a noir sandbox. Lust and anger find their nastiest expression yet.
British filmmaker Glass, who made her exciting debut with the 2019 horror film Saint Maud, opens Love Lies Bleeding with a bit of stargazing and a touch of magic. The camera slowly pans to a warehouse in New Mexico, where music blares and people crowd. What kind of eerie night cave is this? He is momentarily disappointed when he finds out that it is just a gym, full of men and women using machines and dumbbells to exhaust themselves. Surrounding billboards carry slogans such as “Only losers quit.''
The urge to make yourself bigger through weight, drugs, guns, power, or even love echoes through “Love Lies Bleeding.” Glass lingers on his bulging muscles, almost Hulk-like, many times, but those expansions have no effect on the enormity that Lou and Jackie ultimately find together.
Poison is also lurking everywhere. For those who exercise, there is one weakness. Lou is a smoker but is trying to quit. Jackie is into bodybuilder fantasies and self-actualization mania. And then there's the viciousness of the local shooting range. Lou Sr. (Harris) presides over a corrupt gun sales empire behind a desk surrounded by creepy crawlies. Love Lies Bleeding's satire is not timid. The sign says, “Dreams, the next exit.”
Jackie gets a job at a shooting range after a business encounter in his car with the sleazy mullet weirdo JJ (Dave Franco). “It was magical,” he said after something decidedly not magical happened. The real magic comes later in Love Lies Bleeding, but that's not the case with JJ. His abuse of his wife, Lou's sister Beth (Jena Malone), sets off a bloody chain of events that brings Lou unwillingly closer to her estranged father. . She's outraged, Lou Sr.
In a sense, all of this stems from the love that grows between Lou and Jackie. It starts with a steroid injection and a kiss, but quickly turns passionate and protective. Their increasingly close bond drives them to violent extremes. Being in love means being equally ruthless towards his ex-lover (Anna Baryshnikov plays Lou's waning love interest) and her family.
Partly due to the confusion caused by Jackie's Lloyd, “Love Lies Bleeding'' is an unreleased film by Jonathan Majors, not to mention “Iron Claw,'' another gritty A24 movie about familial corruption and muscle. It's an interesting corollary to the bodybuilder movie Magazine Dreams. -building.
Like that movie, “Love Lies Bleeding” is set in the 1980s, but feels more dated. As things swirl in Glass and Weronika Tfilska's screenplay, the film follows horrifying events, sometimes taking in the perspective of Jackie's drug-addicted delirium, such as when she flees to Las Vegas to participate in a bodybuilding contest. I continue to keep my eyes wide open. Lou Sr. glides closer to Lou Sr., calmly pulling on the string.
But it's becoming dangerous to walk away from Stewart. “Love Lies Bleeding” loses a little bit of its momentum every time she’s not on screen. But no one is going to watch Love Lies Bleeding and wish Harris' influence would be diminished. He seems to be getting better with age and his voice sounds better. Although he is portrayed as a buffoon in the film, with his bald head and shoulder-length hair, he is a firm supporter of films that rely on unnecessary outrageous exaggeration. (I fear this is an effect that's becoming increasingly common in today's rundown film world, the urge to overcompensate with outlandish works that expect buzz.)
However, neo-noir made in this style requires a certain amount of forbearance even if it goes bankrupt. As the sign says, “Only losers quit.”
Love's Lies Bleeding, released by A24, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of Japan for violence and gruesome imagery, sexual content, nudity, extensive language, and drug use. Running time: 104 minutes. He is 3 out of 4 stars.